NAKED ART v REAL LIFE NUDITY.

A colleague of mine who has just completed a degree course in Art History wrote to me wondering why as the world of art is full of nakedness - and from his recent studies has always been that way - people should be imprisoned nowadays for wandering about in the nude if that’s what gives them pleasure and they are not harming anyone.

He was of course referring to Stephen Gough a rather sad individual more commonly known as “The Naked Rambler” – a matter that I have already dealt with in some detail in the past as it relates to the subject of naturism. In this respect genuine followers of this quite legitimate lifestyle which has grown in popularity over the years have lately been invaded by a few individuals who now feel that it is their legal right to be nude where ever and whenever they feel like it. Fortunately they are few and far between and presently create no real problems except to themselves, but as the subject of nudity is a most profitable one for the media it regularly receives far more publicity than it really deserves. This matter of course has very little to do with art , however my friend has made a quite important point .

It is true that the world of art is full of naked images and the fact is that it almost always has been that way – the results appearing in respectable public buildings , museums and galleries all over the world without any great fuss being made about it – but a little like naturism it has not at times been without its inherent problems.

As far as nudity is concerned it’s only comparatively quite recently within the history of mankind that human beings have had such a strange and un-naturally obsessive attitude towards the wearing of clothing. None of those great civilisations of the ancient world saw any reason to cover the naked body except for the natural ones of common sense and in almost all of the superbly executed drawings, paintings and sculptures of those times - and even sometimes as the decoration of their everyday domestic artefacts - it is clear to us that the people of these ancient races actually revelled in the beauty of the naked human body in all its forms and shapes, both male and female.

Almost all the religious ritual of these times was dominated by the reverence of sex , and reproductive creativity - as represented in sexual intercourse between men & women - was recognised as the sole purpose of human existence. The human body was a thing to be admired and no part of it - including the male penis or the female vagina and breasts - was considered to be in any way , dirty , disgusting or obscene and nudity , whenever or wherever it occurred was just a perfectly normal part of everyday life.

For many years , most of these quite beautiful representations of naked beauty were kept locked away in the dark vaults of some museum or another. Thank goodness , in the light of the present and much more liberal artistic policies of most Western governments , many of them are now freely available for us all to see.

However , there were enormous structural and political changes taking place in our world of 2000 years or so ago and most of this change was centred around religion , with new and powerful ones constantly emerging from the chaos. All these new religions - and among them Christianity and Islam soon became the most influential - held radically opposite beliefs to their predecessors.

Medieval art was mainly about these new religious beliefs, with little or no overt nudity, however the sensual myths of the Gods fired the Renaissance and nakedness , love and lust was displayed in practically all their artistic representations.

The Victorians kept much of their artistic nudity hidden away from the public gaze , but it all came back with a vengeance in the 20^th century. Frollo, Lempica and Modigliano are just a few artists of the Art Nouveau period who produced fairly explicit sexual images in their work without having too many problems with authority.

In more modern times , Reg Butler who died in 1981 and was one of the best known sculptors in the 1950’ & 60’s did not shy away from including the female genitalia in his lifelike studies of naked women reclining.

Ron Muerk the Australian artist now working in the UK is even more explicit , both his male and female nudes often several times more than lifesize and made in silicon or polyester and include real hair, faithfully reproduce every minute detail of the human body including of course their genitalia. These incredibly lifelike models do not appear to create any sense of outrage, having been displayed at galleries all over the world including our own illustrious Royal Academy.

Jeff Koons , the American multi-media artist of some repute has over the years produced a number of extremely explicit pictures some - of him having sex with his wife for example - verging on the pornographic but which nevertheless have been exhibited at The Barbican in London and are presently on show in the Guggenheim museum in Bilbao.

These two small pictures were on show at the Barbican Galleries a few years ago as part of an exhibition by the New London Art group. Although produced vaguely in the impressionist style it’s not too difficult to see what the subjects are getting up to.

Lucien Freud

The Czech artist Jan Sadek had these three pictures shown in a reputable London gallery without any complaint.

19th century Japanese art was pretty explicit.

And finally – this large picture entitled Nice and Easy by John Currie, a modern take on an original Botticalli, recently sold for more than five and a half million dollars.

But art no matter how explicit in form or how realistic it may appear cannot in any sense be equated with real life nudity. Generally speaking the majority of people in the western world do not nowadays have any major issue with nudity in general , but allowing people to be naked wherever and whenever they like is a completely different matter. The fact is that it is not the general term nakedness ie; not wearing clothing that is the problem, but the obvious exposure of the sexual organs.

Representations of human beings no matter how good or how bad or indifferent the artwork, or even how sexually explicit , they are no more than inanimate objects They give off no human like smell and cannot change form, touch or physically interact with the viewer other than visually perhaps.

So there you are !!!!.